Probing the Sterile Neutrino Dipole Portal with SN1987A and Low-Energy Supernovae

Abstract: BSM electromagnetic properties of neutrinos may lead to copious production of sterile neutrinos in the hot and dense core of a core-collapse supernova. In this work, we focus on the active-sterile transition magnetic moment portal for heavy sterile neutrinos. Firstly, we revisit the SN1987A cooling bounds for dipole portal using the integrated luminosity method, which yields more reliable results (especially in the trapping regime) compared to the previously explored via emissivity loss, aka the Raffelt criterion. Secondly, we obtain strong bounds on the dipole coupling strength reaching as low as $10^{-11} \text{ GeV}^{-1}$ from energy deposition, i.e., constrained from the observation of explosion energies of underluminous Type IIP supernovae. In addition, we find that sterile neutrino production from Primakoff upscattering off of proton dominates over scattering off of electron for low sterile neutrino masses.